Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday July 10, 2007 @04:03AM
from the ambivalent-in-sweden dept.

Naycon writes "In the end it looks like the Swedish police dropped the Pirate Bay from the list of sites filtered for containing child porn. The update of the filter, which is scheduled for later this week, won't contain the Swedish file-sharing giant. The police say that the reason for this change is that the torrent containing the porn has been removed. But the Pirate Bay states that no files have been removed. Was this just a cheap trick by the Swedish police to battle file-sharing? The link contains a statement from the Pirate Bay; several Swedish newspaper are also running the story." In a related story, reader paulraps writes "Sweden's Justice Department is backing a new proposal that would enable copyright holders to find out the identities of people illegally sharing their material on the Internet."

I want to point out that still to this day, the police has not given us one single hint on what content on the site has been containing child porn - and the things we have filtered out has been proven not to be child porn either.

(my emphasis)
Which sounds to me like they did remove something, and maybe even that if there was child porn they would remove that too. I'm not saying that's good or bad, just the Slashdot headline seems inaccurate. (Unless the article doesn't mean what I think.)

Heh, well I guess it's the Slashdot headline I didn't understand! I guess it means "won't be on the censored list". But the summary also says "the Pirate Bay states that no files have been removed", but the linked article makes it sound like they did.

Your logic doesn't make sense. How could all those sorry bastards battle child porn if they couldn't download it first to check if it really is child porn? The thing with The Pirate Bay seems to be that some jerkoffs had described torrents as containing child porn, when in fact, they did not. That the police acted on this without verifying - downloading - the material is totally unacceptable and I hope they will get their fare share of kicks in the groin for it.

I tried submitting a more balanced third-party article about this earlier,

Considering the comments you made today and on the prvious story, the idea of you writing a "balanced third party article" is ludicrous.

And since you've used Google to find these torrents, why don't you extend your campaign to them? By plugging the terms into Google, I can immediately find hundreds of sites with the same links. Is every indexing site, web or torrent, supposed to send new links to you for approval before they make

Considering the comments you made today and on the prvious story, the idea of you writing a "balanced third party article" is ludicrous.

I wasn't referring to what I wrote. I was referring to the article I linked, which was written by a third party, and was not a Pirate Bay blog entry. I thought the summary was quite fair, though: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=216345 [slashdot.org]

You were the one who was accusing me of writing biased articles, as I recall.

Not quite. I said "the idea of you writing a 'balanced third party article' is ludicrous". it still is, I'm afraid.

Anyway, there's no point in us feuding. You obviously have a deep hatred for anything that smacks of kiddie porn. I understand the feeling, but it's exactly this feeling which is being exploited by parties who want to attack TPB. I see no good at all being done for the subjects of these mysterious photos (mysteriou

I understand the feeling, but it's exactly this feeling which is being exploited by parties who want to attack TPB.

The point is that TPB brought this on themselves with their own choices, and trying to whitewash it all as nothing but a police conspiracy helps nobody. I'm sure the police didn't waste much time taking advantage of the situation after the humiliation they've suffered from TPB's actions, but in the end, they were justified in doing so, at least to some extent. Had TPB behaved morally in the fir

Several different user accounts have mysteriously disappeared, within hours of this story hitting the net. No, I don't think that's a coincidence. The Pirate Bay admins themselves have complained that they had to guess at which files to remove because they got no communication from the police.

(The Police and The Pirate Bay both claim they were unable to contact the other.)

kopimi - Y-day 23:40when searching for child porn the moderators found a lot of spam, false torrent descriptions and other stuff. it's therefor they got deleted.the admins _suspended_ some torrents that where questionable but they are back if they where correctly described or such.users are deleted all the time when they spam or put up spyware/virus and so on.

In a swedish newspaper they stated that they hadn't removed anything. Guess both sides are lying here.Anyway, here is some info about the filter:The filter is not mandatory in anyway. Its voluntary for the ISPs to implement it, and I'd estimate that about half of the swedish ISPs does it. Its also just a simple DNS filter, so its easy to get around by using another dns server, or running your own.

What is interesting in here is the fact that the agreement between the ISPs and the police states that neither p

In a swedish newspaper they stated that they hadn't removed anything. Guess both sides are lying here.

kopimi - Y-day 23:40when searching for child porn the moderators found a lot of spam, false torrent descriptions and other stuff. it's therefor they got deleted.the admins _suspended_ some torrents that where questionable but they are back if they where correctly described or such.users are deleted all the time when they spam or put up spyware/virus and so on.

Which sounds to me like they did remove something, and maybe even that if there was child porn they would remove that too

According to some comments in the blog, their admins checked a lot of torrrents some had claimed to be CP. They didn't find any of that, but did find other crap, like viruses, falsely labelled files, duplicates, etc and so they did remove those.

I have to say if one did want to trade CP, you would be competely insane to do it via a publc torrent indexing site. As far as I can see, the worst anyone has found is child models -- young kids wearing clothes, posing in a way some might find provocative, but no more so than in a JC Penney catalog. Sure, some are using it for sexaul gratification, but you could say the same about zucchinis and no one tries to ban them.

childporn is a to sensitive topic to be brushed away with the usual smartass piratebay routine. I's just as good to duck when they start tossing childporn over the battlefield, even if it's nonce sense.

By referring to a file that was supposedly removed the Swedish police can say that they did their job correctly and remove the black mark they put next to The Pirate Bay's name without having to backtrack or publicly apologise in any way.

This is pretty standard practice with police everywhere nowadays: the politics of policing seems to be more important than actual policing.

By referring to a file that was supposedly removed the Swedish police can say that they did their job correctly and remove the black mark they put next to The Pirate Bay's name without having to backtrack or publicly apologise in any way.

That's probably right, but perhaps there is a bit more to it. Perhaps it is in the interests of law enforcement agencies for there to be sites like The Pirate Bay in order to track, profile and investigate potential offenders. A bit like a 'raise the flag and shoot whoever salutes' trick. It wasn't, after all, their job to stop software piracy, copyright infringement or anything else other than child porn.

I would imagine it's actually rather difficult to infiltrate a group of individuals which does not me

To put it in perspective: the supposed issue was that thePirateBay held links to child-porn, which is illegal in Sweden (there are forms of content that are illegal, but only some to which it is illegal to simply link). The government was proposing to have most of the major Swedish ISPs blacklist the site for having such links.

TPB stated that they do not hold such links, and if any are reported they are immediately investigated and removed. Since it is a forum on which anyone can post links to content, this is the most active policy it is possible to enforce. Therefore there are no grounds for blacklisting.

Most people suspect this was just a muscle-flexing on the part of the Swedish government - possibly under pressure from US and other governments, and ultimately from the MPAA, RIAA and other non-US affiliated organisations - and that it would come to nothing. They were just saying "Yes, you know our laws and do not flout them, but don't push it".

And in this case, it seems that this is indeed what happened. They have shown that they're not afraid to exercise a little force to keep ThePirateBay in line (albeit unnecessarily, in my opinion), and I daresay they've not harmed their cause at all in this regard. TPB is actually pretty strict and even-handed anyway, but this may have meant to serve as a bit of a warning from the Govt to anyone looking for inappropriate material: If you're after kiddy porn, TPB is not the place to look, and nor is Sweden.

I've simplified a little, and coloured heavily with my own opinion, but I just wanted to present a little more background for those who don't really give a fuck about all this but will insist on commenting anyway.

But TPB doesn't host any actual files, just the torrent. So if the only people downloading Bob's torrents are people that he specifically invites, then why would he be putting it up on TPB at all. Since he is hosting the torrent, couldn't he just email the tracker to all the people who he wants to send the file to, or simply send them a URL to some password protected web directory so they could download the torrent file? Seems like a lot of extra risk to take, putting something like that up on a public s

Well, because it's the cleanest way of distributing a file to a number of people at once. It's efficient, and assuming no-one twigs, there aren't any copies left anywhere.

If you post even an encrypted RAR to a rapishare or a YouSendIt or whatever, then most likely there's a bit-for-bit copy of your stash on their servers for authorities to examine if they twig to what you're up to.

Fair enough, you could host the tracker yourself, but its not in the realms of the inconceivable for someone to do what I

> TPB stated that they do not hold such links, and if any are reported they are immediately investigated and removed.
Those statements are not logically cohesive. If you run a tracker indexing hundreds of thousands of torrents, you have no idea whether or not you index any child porn torrents.

It's perfectly "cohesive" (if by that you mean logical). TPB didn't claim they had no child porn. They said thay would remove any if they were notified. What else can any site that allows public to upload do?

Are you saying that all the downloads are for products that aren't good enough to be bought?

Living in Poland, getting to know some local populace.. I'd have to say that people in Poland value their entertainment. But they value their money a lot more and they will not spend it if they can help it.

I've known people who were filesharing non-stop getting cut off from the Internet for over a year. They did not buy a single movie/song during that period.

I downloaded the song "I Want Candy" by Bow Wow Wow the other day.This is not a lost sale. I would never buy the CD the song is on. In fact, you CAN'T buy this CD in the country that I am in. It simply doesn't exist here. And, even if it was, I wouldn't buy it. Basically, it's a good song that I'll listen to on random play. But, pay for the whole CD? Nope.

On the other hand, I saw a video on YouTube by a band named "Clutch" the other day. I downloaded another song of theirs off the internet. And n

Except in the TPB blog, people posted links to questionable torrents, and some of them went dead soon after. I didn't verify the contents of these torrents, but some stuff was removed for sure. Like all torrents by this user:http://thepiratebay.org/user/debruin/ [thepiratebay.org] (Nothing to see there now..since it was removed, but I am certain there was stuff there earlier.)

I guess if one were inclined to give both parties the benefit of the doubt, it might be a matter of what is seen as child porn. The police thought it was, TBP didn't, but deleted things anyway at the request of some users.

TPB seems to have has many times more child porn uploaded on their site the past few days, than all the years they've been operating. So whomever it was that decided to put TPB on that list, has in fact _increased_ the distribution of child porn.

So whomever it was that decided to put TPB on that list, has in fact _increased_ the distribution of child porn.

Perhaps that was the point?

If you claim that they're being delisted because of child pornography, and then the masses decides to revolt against that by uploading gigabytes of child porn, you just validated your original (false at the onset) assertion. Now they CAN take TPB down, because they are, in fact, a party to distributing child pornography.

Mr. Andersson put it quite directly, and straight to the point: Bending over to the recording industry will do more harm than good in the long run.

Right now, it's quite possible to follow the trail of data. P2P links directly from source to destination. With data retention and easier access to user data, users will switch to tools that reroute the traffic through multiple nodes from source to destination, so following it becomes near impossible.

Currently, people don't use it. Simple reason: It increases traffic by a multiple, depending on the number of hosts you route it through, it can three, four or tenfold. And thus the data throughput is lower. So following the trail of "really" criminal data is quite possible for the police. Should someone (ab)use a P2P network to transfer data that doesn't only infringe copyright but actually contains something that would interest a general attorney (not only because of lobbying of certain interest groups but because it is the G.A.'s biz, because it DOES actually affect every citizen if a crime of this kind if committed), it's fairly easily possible to find source and destination.

If now file sharing is criminalized, people will quickly pick up obfuscation mechanisms to protect themselves against the recording industry. And thus will protect invariably those that use those channels to distribute data that can be used for (or is by its very nature) a crime. Not only against certain interest groups and minorities, but against the majority of people on this planet.

In other words, the RIAA is helping pedophiles and terrorists all over the planet (hey, why should terrorhype and thinkofthechildren only be used by the adversaries of privacy?).

Yeah. But onion routing is only one way of foiling traffic-analysis.
Downloading to a shared machine (with many users) that deliberately does not keep logs, and then transfering from that machine to your own using an encrypted protocol also works.
It does mean transfering the content twice -- first to the shared machine, and then from there to your own machine, but that isn't a very large price to pay.
But true, onion-routing is practical. And gets more practical as bandwith grows more than the content grows.
I've got the lowest speed offered by my ISP. 10Mbps symetrical. At that speed, downloading an album of music compressed to say 192Kbps takes on the order of half a minute. If it would instead take 5 minutes, but be untracable, that wouldn't be a huge price to pay at all. Yes it's an order of magnitude more, who cares, it's still 5 minutes.
Even larger stuff, say something which is 1GB large. At line-speed that is 10 minutes. If it took an hour, but was untracable, again that'd be a reasonable enough trade-off.
And I'm being conservative here. You don't need to bounce the average packet trough 10 nodes to give plausible deniability. I doubt it's going to be possible to convict someone for something that it is, for example, 25% likely he is actually guilty of. (which would require bouncing packets trough on the average 3 dummy-nodes.)

If that view went trough, it'd essentially become illegal for anyone to forward encrypted packets to anyone.

This has no chance in hell to fly. You will have banks (who will certainly NOT want to live anymore without netbanking, since it shifts the work towards their customer) and large corporations (who would never do without VPN anymore) against you. Both very strong, powerful and financially potent, and quite heavy on the lobbying lever. If the content industry can outweigh them, it's time to be very, ver

If now file sharing is criminalized, people will quickly pick up obfuscation mechanisms to protect themselves

File sharing was criminalized as soon as Newsweek published the first article describing what it was to the computer illiterate. I reasoned along the same lines as you're reasoning when they shut down Napster (oh, boy, now the file-sharers are going to create an underground, untraceable network), but it never materialized. If it didn't happen then, it's not going to happen now (not that I'm a big

Things like this emerge out of need, not out of vision. After Napster's demise, there was no need for an untracable network. There was a need for a replacement, granted, and behold, it came into existance. Actually more than one.Back then the RIAA didn't have direct access to ISP data, there was no mandatory data retention for ISPs as there is now in the EU, and actually privacy still mattered (kinda-sorta). This is changing. Due to eroding privacy and more and more pandering to content industry crying, mor

I know it's becoming common to reduce every argument to the bottom line and ignore the reasoning behind it, but do you think it's possible, at least here on/., to remain in the good tradition of actual discussion (akin to the philosophers of the days of yore, not Oprah and Springer)? If you don't like my argument, you're invited to counter it with an argument. Yelling WROOOOONG is none.

It doesn't make sharing copyrighted material legal. I don't claim that it does, nor do I want to argue in favor of copyright infringements. All I want to argue is that, knowing human nature, this is the logic consequence. What is more likely? That people stop using P2P to share files they shouldn't, or that they will adapt and evade the tracing mechanisms? Keep in mind that it does not require any knowledge of tracing and avoiding it, all it takes is to download a tool that does it for you. Quite similar to the way P2P already works. How many of the people using P2P tools have the foggiest clue how they work?

And since people will do whatever necessary to avoid being tracable, this development will lead towards more privacy for those that actually do commit a crime. When you push ordinary people in the vicinity of real criminals, they will aid those criminals, simply by being indistinguishable from them.

So if you want to take my argument apart, please do. I enjoy a good discussion, and yes, I'm aware of the most obvious counter argument, that it's the people's fault if they're helping the criminals by using better encryption and better obfuscation. The question remains whether they'd do it if they weren't pushed to do it. Because, as said above, people will not heed a law they don't support. They will do whatever necessary to evade it, but they will not bow to it.

it has also been suggested in various swedish blogs that the reason for this could be to label the pirate bay and file sharing in general as a dirty business and to scare people away from it by associating it with child porn. representatives of the danish antipiracy movement has stated that child porn is actually a good tool for fighting piracy (source http://forum.piratpartiet.se/Topic79221-15-5.aspx# bm79282 [piratpartiet.se]), if service providers agree to filter child porn and help prosecute those who distribute it (as is the case for most providers in sweden today), it will be a much smaller step to do the same for copyrighted material.

That may very well be the case.However, it's also true. The Pirate Bay has been running (and, I hear, still runs) torrents for very borderline if not outright illegal child porn material. They have refused to remove them (like many other trackers do) until now when it suddenly got worldwide attention, when they started nuking torrents left and right.

even so, the very reason why The Pirate Bay has not yet been shut down by swedish authorities is because no copyrighted material actually exists on their servers due to the nature of Bittorrents and simply linking to it is not a crime (yet atleast). swedish child pornography laws only prohibit posession of child pornographic material, linking to it or viewing it, even posession of it in the form of a browser cache in some cases is not considered illegal. the staff of TPB does not have the resources to view

To make things perfectly clear - we don't host any content. And I have never seen child porn on the bay. Our moderators work on all the reports we receive from the public and they contact ECPAT or other organisations if they found suspicious stuff. The police has never contacted us in any aspect regarding child porn!

To make things perfectly clear - we don't host any content. And I have never seen child porn on the bay.

and

"We have a police[policy] to not remove torrents. We have however reported the ten or so suspected child porn torrents to the police..."

The 2 are not mutually exclusive. One states he has not seen any child porn, the other states that they have forwarded 10 or so suspected child porn torrents to the police. If they haven't received any confirmations on those 10, then there's no confirmed child porn o

Once again, Google does work actively to block child porn in their index. It's just that their task is a handful of orders of magnitude bigger. And TPB certainly wouldn't be incapable of policing and removing suspicious torrents - many other torrent sites already do.Also, they don't do much the same thing. The Pirate Bay is not a torrent indexer, it's a BitTorrent tracker. They run all their own torrents, they don't find them elsewhere, so they certainly have a much larger responsibility towards what they l

Thank you. It's very important to not forget the fact that a lot of p2p content is questionable to say the least, but for it to be illegal it must be subject to investigation by professionals and tried in a court of law. Sadly for our legal system, the swedish police authority wants to cut the process a lot shorter. Also, just because pictures of scantily clad children and teens upset a lot of people doesn't make it illegal. I would consider TPB to be hypocritical if they let their own judgement decide what

"The aim of the proposal is to facilitate efforts to clamp down on illegal file-sharing. This in turn is expected to stimulate the development of lawful alternatives for the spread of music and movies over the internet, according to a statement from the Justice Department.

Tobias Andersson, press spokesman for lobby organization Piratbyrån, was critical of the move.

"This is completely crazy," he said, before adding that "it is time to stop pampering the record industry".

"The danger here is that it will speed up the development of anonymous file-sharing programmes that make it technically more difficult to trace somebody's internet use. These kinds of services can also be exploited by people involved in criminal activities, such as paedophiles".

============

Okaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyy. So the guy from the 'pirate party' is now trying to defend a website full of copyrighted material because "to attack our freedom to share copies of spiderman 3, is to encourage paedophiles".This is truly pathetic, and goes to show the lengths some people will go to in order to keep on getting music, movies and other stuff for free. If the pirate bay really gave a damn about free speech, they would remove *all* copyrighted material, and merely use the site to host information that genuinely should be protected, like leaked documents from whistleblowers, information that governments want suppressed, political opinions far outside the mainstream etc etc. The fact is, maybe 0.01% of stuff on TPB will fall into a 'geneuine protected speech' category, the rest is just copyrighted stuff people want to leech.By doing this, ironically, they are totally undermining the legitimate argument for the protection of a free, uncensored web, and peoples right to publish information of a sensitive nature. If you put some civil right activist in a courtroom arguing that its essential that TPB exists because it is a defence of free speech, he will just be totally crushed by an opposition lawyer who hands the judge a PC and shows him the top 500 torrents on TPB.

If you care about privacy, freedom of information and censroship, defending people like TPB is entirely the wrong way to do it. They trivialise the entire argument into "my human rights to get free hollywood movies".

Okaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyy. So the guy from the 'pirate party' is now trying to defend a website full of copyrighted material because "to attack our freedom to share copies of spiderman 3, is to encourage paedophiles".

You completely missed what he did say in your efforts to rush forward with what you wanted him to say.

What he said is that forcing file sharing to go underground is going to accelerate the development of tools that make said file sharing harder to trace. If child porn is the government's larger concern as they claim it is, then they should recognize that those same tools will be used by those priority targets which will make catching them tougher. It is true, but not a good argument.

I don't respect people who take other peoples hard work, distribute it, and make advertising revenue from doing so.Plus, have you thought through their argument?industry says "we want to remove the anonymity of filesharers"

pirates say "this is wrong. removing anonymity will result in more anonymous file sharing services, which will be a haven for paedophiles"

so basically the pirates are saying anonymity is bad because it will allow people to break the law. And from this, they conclude that anonymity shoul

I don't respect people who take other peoples hard work, distribute it, and make advertising revenue from doing so.

Technically, TPB doesn't distribute, It provides a forum for others to distribute. The people distributing aren't making money from advertising. They are paying for their own bandwidth, so you could even argue that they are losing money. The advertising on the Pirate Bay's site is so they can afford to run the site, servers aren't free you know.

Plus, have you thought through their argument?

Yes, let me break it down for you.
In the beginning, there was Napster. Napster and other "p2p" sites weren't really peer-to-peer. they were "facilitated peer-to-p

the advertising on TPB makes a fortune, to run a site which you keep boasting hosts no content, and thus is relatively low bandwidth. Its a big money making scam, dressed up as some sort of 'stick it to the man' bullshit.I don't want uploaders anonymity removed so they develop a more hardcore encrypted system, I want them to obey the fucking law and pay for content like honest people. Is that so hard to understand?

The people using the pirate bay are just too tight assed to pay for their entertainment like e

TPB hosts no copyrighted content. It does host the torrent trackers that point others to the torrents. It also hosts the website itself and all the overhead that goes with that. Plus there is the upkeep of the physical servers to hold all of this, perfectly legal (at least in Sweden), content.

The only ads I have ever seen on TPB are for TPB, TPB merchandise, and The Swedish Pirate Party (as in political, not like with rum and buxom wenches). So they aren't making a fortune of advertising. They might be ma

Nope. "to each according to there needs, from each according to their means." I think that was Marx, and it also sounds like the arguments put forward for taking other peoples work for free often spouted by defenders of TPB.

I'll come back to slashdot when I feel like it mate. It's not your website, and knowing your sort, you'd claim that 'all property s theft' anyway. HAHAHAHA.So tell me, when you're not TYPING IN CAPITALS, how do you earn a living, in some magical way where people do not need to pay for what you do I presume?

Freedom of Speech means being able to say and do things that other people find offensive.Much of the piracy you see is a result of an old outdated 'Copyright' law. One that has been systemically modified, expanded, extended, and enhanced over the years from what it was originally meant to be.

14 Years was the original duration of Copyright. If it was still the case then maybe just maybe people would respect it more. Now its been expanded to Life + 70 years and in the case of companies possibly indefinately/f

This is truly pathetic, and goes to show the lengths some people will go to in order to keep on getting music, movies and other stuff for free. If the pirate bay really gave a damn about free speech, they would remove *all* copyrighted material, and merely use the site to host information that genuinely should be protected, like leaked documents from whistleblowers, information that governments want suppressed, political opinions far outside the mainstream etc etc. The fact is, maybe 0.01% of stuff on TPB will fall into a 'geneuine protected speech' category, the rest is just copyrighted stuff people want to leech.

All the 'good' things you mentioned are almost certainly copyrighted too you know. Who gets to decide what is 'good' infringing material, and what is 'bad' infringing material? Defending free speech means defending all of it, even those things that you disagree with personally.

Ah, but leeching free copies of spiderman 3 isn't free speech at all! I hear you say. Which just goes to show what a good job the media industry have done.

Remember, copyright is a two-way deal. I suspend my free speech right to diseminate copies of public domain material for a period of exclusivity for creating copies by the original author. For 14 years, if I remember rightly. All so that ever greater amounts of creative works enter the public domain, for the benefit of all - our shared culture to grow ever richer, for derivative works to grow, for the education and entertainment of all. All works will enter the public domain, because the stories and ideas and shared culture that people create from also come from the public domain.

Fast forward a couple of hundred years. Copyright isn't a deal any more. It's 'intellectual property'. Ideas, stories, music all of it. Locked up in digital vaults, defended by infinitely-extending copyright duration. Huge amounts of material should be in the public domain by now, and yet none of it is. Some musicians in the UK are complaining that their 'property' is about to expire after 50 years. Well, the deal was even less generous when they created the works, yet they want to extend the duration of the copyrights again, and again, and again after the fact.

Well you know what? Stuff them. They had a deal. and they broke it, over and over again. I have a right to make backup copies, I have a right to share these materials with my friends and I have a right watch it in any damn way I please. The law may not recognise these rights, but any law which criminalises 60-70% of the population (and if you include trivial violations like media shifting, it's damn near 100%) is a bad law, and should be repealed. There are alternative ways to encourage and fund creative works, and get them into the public domain - lets explore that.

You argue my views, and the exercise of them is illegal, and should be prevented by people like TPB. How is that any different than making illegal and banning 'proper' free speech like whistleblowers? They feel that all speech is to be protected, even copyright violations, as copyright law is broken, just as laws protecting corporations from whistleblowers or banning political speech are broken.

They trivialise the entire argument into "my human rights to get free hollywood movies".

The human rights underlying the whole copyright argument - free speech, privacy, anonymity, corporate mal-influence over the political process, restriction of the public domain, DRM etc etc are pretty important too. Defending the pirate bay is a way to bring the whole thing into the open, and perhaps reform the political and legal landscape to benefit the public and the artists rather than all the money and influence being with corporate middlemen who add nothing to the exchange, only pervert the system for their monetary benefit.

Repeat after me: TPB does not host copyrighted material, they only host the directory of where to get it. Maybe you should go after google next, because they index TPB. No? THEN SHUT THE FUCK UP, or, change your argument to not make you sound like an idiot.

Actually, he's stating a very logical consequence of shutting down public BT sites and programs. People looking for normal copyrighted files will look for/make the programs needed which will as a consequence of government action be anonymous. The amount of people looking for non-illicit material is much more than those looking for illicit material, thusly they are more likely to get such a program made. However, once made it is certain to be used by the purveyors of the illicit material(in this case child p

hello coward. has it occurred to you that these guys are just facilitating others breaking the law? its a pathetic moral defence to say "I'm not actually physically hosting the bytes in this case", its a bit like saying "I just told them how to bypass the locks, I didn't actually physically break in, officer"TPB exists so that geeks can get hollywood movies for free, while its owners rake in advertising cash. It's a business model based upon copyright infringement and leeching. Dressing it up as anything el

Don't get your knickers in a twist - Copyright infringement isn't wrong, it's just currently illegal. If there was a law telling you to kill your firstborn, would you obey it because it's the law? No, of course not. A law forbidding you from passing on information is arguably "less" bad than a law requiring you to kill your firstborn. But it's still bad, and one should not respect unjust laws.If you disagree with a law, encouraging disrespect for it is a good thing, and The Pirate Bay encourages disrespe

its a pathetic moral defence to say "I'm not actually physically hosting the bytes in this case", its a bit like saying "I just told them how to bypass the locks, I didn't actually physically break in, officer"

Yeah, it would be just as wrong as publishing an article [slashdot.org] about. [wikipedia.org]

TPB exists so that geeks can get hollywood movies for free, while its owners rake in advertising cash. It's a business model based upon copyright infringement and leeching.

I assure you, I haven't been tempted to download Hollywood movies or RIAA music for ages. I can't imagine why anyone would be.

TPB only links to copyrighted and illegally hosted material, and it does it deliberately in an anonymous way to help them get away with it. IE doesn't mask the URL does it? Think about it. And learn to be civil kid.

I don't know if it's in the top 100, but the Comes v. Microsoft case materials were put in a torrent on TPB, and I believe it was my suggestion to put them there (someone on Groklaw said they'd preserved them and wanted to know what to do with them).

No I'm not. I just disagree with you, but if you are incapable of debating the merits of your argument without becoming abusive, that just speaks volumes. You claim TPB is some kind of pro-free speech site that happens to have the odd copyrighted file. I point out the entire top 100 is copyrighted, and you get all antsy about it. Face facts, TPB is a warez site. its designed to make getting illegal copies of other peoples work easy. The top 100 shows this glaringly. Just face the facts, the site is entirely

It seems odd that a positive bias is afforded to the pirate bay (certainly not negative) when we know they really do facilitate copyright infringement.

I, for one, do have a positive bias toward TPB, even though they facilitate copyright infringement. Mostly because I have yet to hear a convincing argument as to how copyright infringement is a Bad Thing(tm).

You yourself admit that it has helped you weed out the junk in your movie purchases. And the studios still get your money for the good stuff. If this means that the movie studios and the record labels don't get to make any money off of stuff people don't want to watch/listen to, all the better.

We are said that file-sharing is killing the business of publishers so they may give up creating new content.Following that logic, file-sharing child porn is something that everybody should do as it would make creating child porn economically unfeasible and would end it.

In a related story, reader paulraps writes "Sweden's Justice Department is backing a new proposal that would enable copyright holders to find out the identities of people illegally sharing their material on the Internet."

I find this pretty sick... Isn't the point of having law enforcement do this because they are supposed to uphold certain legal standards? Sure, they may still not always do, but besides that. What if the copyright holder happens to be someone like Hell's Angels and they legally get your ide

I think that the multinationals (music industry etc) and their US government lackeys will continue to do whatever they have to do until they shut TPB down.

If that means having someone post purported or real child porn to the site and then raiding TPB, that is what they'll do. There is no doubt in my mind that they will create a situation to enable them to take action if necessary. The criminal and corrupt elements within the US government (of which there are many, and they are the same ones who would be taking money from RIAA lobbyists both on and off the record) have learned that this is the most effective way to get things done when they want to, but can't because people's rights get in the way.

Usually they try intimidation, if you see the letters page on TPB you can see the many attempts at this; while their responses are not the most professional thing in the world, I find them very enjoyable to read because these corporate lawyers are so used to being able to scare people into submission. It's especially enjoyable to read the ones where there has been a back and forth going on and you see the lawyers get more exasperated - yes, they are juvenile at times, and seem to be asking for further confrontation - but enjoyable nonetheless. You can see them at the link below.

At least in Sweden they can say "this is our law, if members of our government or police or US companies don't like it, too bad because the law trumps their opinion." It used to be that in the United States we had a constitution that protected us from government abuse. Now we don't - and the small portions of it which have not been completely subverted are just ignored at the whim of the powerful.

Many people believe that concepts like copyright are doing severe harm to the progress of human culture, arts, science, and civilization as a whole. Anyone can see the damaging effects of intellectual property laws firsthand in this dawn of the Information Age. Sharing movies, books, etc. is only one aspect of this fight which must be fought...and won. That you can't see beyond the issue of mere "movie piracy" (which has a negligible to zero effect on movie sales anyway) makes it little wonder that this seems like a silly ideal to fight for.

The free flow of information could be saving lives and making the world a better place for everyone if it were allowed.

The pathetic thing about the pirate bay in general is they're doing immature things that aren't worth risking your freedom for. People are meant to risk their lives and freedom for ideals worth protecting, not the freedom to download copies of the latest far from essential Hollywood trash without paying for it.

Absolutely, people should never do silly things like protesting unfair copyright laws or tea taxes. All civil disobedience should always be based on high minded intellectual ideals and never on actual concrete things that piss people off like unfair taxes, or the price of bread. Thank you for revealing to us what people are meant to risk their lives for. People are obviously too stupid to make that sort of decision and we have desperately needed someone like you to come along and tell us what ideals are

So you are saying that we should treat the guy sharing a bootlegged copy of Spiderman 3 as if they were peddling child porn?

All joking aside, and as much as I dislike pedophiles. I have to say the exact same standards for someone sharing a copy of some movie should be the same standards we use to prosecute pedophiles.

Which is to say that you should not be able to convict someone based on an IP address alone. The police when dealing with those who peddle and share child porn often have to go through alot. The timeline is typically something like this.

Pedo gets caught talking to a 10 year old girl IRL by their parents. (skip this if its potential sting operation by a legal entity)Parents contact FBI (see above)FBI agent pretends to be 10 year old girl.Pedo eventually tells FBI Agent posing at 10 year old girl to come meet them at X-location.FBI gets warrant to show to ISP getting themselves the physical house address to the IP address corresponding.FBI gets warrant to search the premesis based on evidence in last step.FBI raids the house when they see the people are home and seize all the computer equipment and arrest everyone inside.

Which is a far cry away from the RIAA/MPAA modelGet IP AddressIssue DMCA order to ISP to get them to try and cough up the name/address of the person who owns the accountExtort money from said person (We know that you were sharing music/movies! Here take our offer of $3000 so we can go away and pretend this never happened)...Profit!